LUST AND VIOLENCE IN THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ANDRONICUS

I COMNENUS,

EMPEROR OF THE ROMANSi

The general impression of the Byzantine period that some may have formed is of

a civilisation which was obsessed with religious dogma and the performance of

complex rituals under the stern eye of Christ the All-Powerful, remarkable also

for the complexity of its administrative processes and the ferocity of its political

and dynastic plotting. Our present civilisation is less concerned with the rituals

and dogmas of religion, but in other respects we have something in common

with these later Romans. Indeed, the story that I am about to tell is one that could

be set in any period. It is a tale of fleshly lust and greed for power, and of

success followed swiftly by destruction. It has picaresque elements, and falls

somewhere in the limbo between melodrama and tragedy.

Let me name the principal characters. Manuel Comnenus was Emperor of the

Romans for 43 years from 1137 to 1180. In his reign the East Roman world was

caught between the Turks and the Arabs on one side and the western European

powers on the other. He attempted to protect his empire by diplomatic

negotiations, by making war when these failed, and by arranging dynastic

marriages for himself and his family, with brides and bridegrooms from

European courts.

Manuel’s cousin Andronicus Comnenus was a few years older, and they grew

up together. Their relationship was based, at least on Manuel’s side, on the

friendship that he felt for a close relative. But the consuming passion of

Andronicus’s life, passing even the love of women, was to make himself

emperor even if this meant removing anyone who stood in his way. It took him

sixty-three years.

Manuel’s second wife, the Frankish princess Maria of Antioch, was not a

Greek, as the name of Xéne or ‘foreigner’, which she was given at the time of

her marriage, shows. The marriage was, as so often, arranged for reasons of

policy. He also hoped that she would give him a son, which his first wife had

failed to do.

A son was born to them, and was named Alexius after the first Comnenian

emperor. He became emperor, with his mother as guardian, soon after his

eleventh birthday, and died at the age of fourteen. During the last years of

Manuel’s life a marriage was arranged between the young prince and the even

younger daughter of the King of France. This Agnes, of whom no portrait

survives, was renamed Anna on her arrival at Constantinople, and after the death

of Alexius she was married to his successor Andronicus, who was more than

fifty years older.

We also lack portraits of three other imperial ladies, with more fully ripened

charms, who at one time or another lavished their favours upon Andronicus.

These were Eudocia, a niece of the emperor Manuel, Philippa of Antioch, sister

of the Maria whom Manuel had married and therefore the emperor’s sister-in-

law, and Theodora, another niece of Manuel’s. By all accounts they were

beautiful. But they were also all closely related to the emperor, and this made

them even more attractive.

Our last two characters are men again. William II was the Norman king of

Sicily. You see him here in a mosaic in his great cathedral at Palermo, offering

the building to the Virgin Mary. He was eager to increase his power and extend

his dominions.

The last principal character is Andronicus’s successor, Isaac Angelus (or

Angelus-Comnenus as he is sometimes known, since he was related to the

Comnenian family). I will tell you the story of his accession later, and mention

two incidents in which he played a part during Andronicus’s reign.

We owe most of our knowledge of this period to three writers. The first is

John Cinnamus, whose historical account of the events of the reigns on John

Comnenus and Manuel Comnenus (up to 1176) is our main source for the events

of Androcicus’s early life. The next, Eustathius, was a priest who rose to

become a professor of rhetoric at Constantinople and was then appointed to the

position of archbishop of Thessalonica. He has long been venerated as a saint in

that area, and in 1988 the Greek Church officially canonised him. He is best

known to classicists as the author of lengthy commentaries on the Homeric

poems. Many of his theological and rhetorical works also survive, and he wrote

an account of the capture of Thessalonica in 1185 by the Normans of Sicily. The

introductory section of this work contains a brief but graphic account of the time

when Andronicus managed to seize power.

Slightly later in date is the historian Nicetas Choniates. He was a public

servant who resigned his position and went off to study law when Andronicus

became emperor, later writing his Historia, which gave an account of events up

to the time of the Fourth Crusade. He was not an admirer of Andronicus, but

gave him credit where credit was due.

Let us begin this account in the year 1180. The emperor Manuel lay upon his

deathbed raging with fever, while the patriarch of Constantinople begged him to

make his soul, and to confirm arrangements to protect the young son, only eleven

years old, whom he was leaving behind him. Manuel, however, was cheerful. He

knew that it was written in the stars that he had a full fourteen years more to live,

and his astrologers had even assured him that once he had recovered from this

temporary indisposition, Venus would again be in the ascendant for him. They

were wrong, doubly wrong, and he passed away, leaving the young Alexius to

succeed him.

The history of Manuel’s marriages and of his children is as follows. In 1146,

three years after his accession to the throne, he married Bertha of Sulzbach, to

fortify the alliance with Germany that he had made against the Norman kingdom

which then controlled southern Italy and Sicily. Following the common custom,

Bertha abandoned her foreign name and took the Greek name of Irene. She was

a woman of many virtues, who tried to live in harmony with her husband. This,

however, did not keep Manuel faithful to her, and after some relatively brief

affairs he entered into a relationship with his niece Theodora, who soon began to

receive the most obvious marks of honour. She was accompanied by a large

entourage, and given a costume and adornments almost equivalent to those of the

legitimate empress. When she arranged to have a rival for the emperor’s favours

assassinated, she escaped punishment, and gifts were lavished upon her, and

upon the son whom she bore, with a prodigal hand.

Marriage with Theodora was impossible because of the closeness of their

relationship, and her son could not succeed to the throne. So when Bertha-Irene

died after thirteen years of marriage, having given him only a daughter, Manuel

hastened to find another empress, one who might give him a legitimate son. The

emperor’s emissaries looked for a suitable candidate, and found Maria of

Antioch, whose charms they described to the emperor as equal to those of

Aphrodite, Juno and Helen of Troy.

In 1161 therefore their nuptials were celebrated in the Great Church of

Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom built by Justinian

I six centuries before.

A portrait of the couple survives. Manuel was shaved for the occasion. Do

not be surprised at the haloes that the bride and bridegroom wear. Roman

emperors are sometimes represented nimbate in art, a practice which can be

traced back as far as the reign of Antoninus Pius. Maria, as has been mentioned,

now took the Greek name of Xéne. The marriage was fruitful after eight years,

when she presented her husband with his only legitimate male offspring, who

was named Alexius in the hope that he would repeat the triumphs of the first

emperor to bear that name.

We shall meet the unfortunate Maria of Antioch and her son Alexius again

soon, but now it is time to look at Manuel’s cousin. The portrait of Andronicus

Comnenus that you see before you does not do him justice, because it shows him

in the last years of his life, after he had become emperor. He was physically an

impressive figure. Six feet in height, strong and accomplished in all physical

activities, he had a remarkable record of resistance to fatigue and disease even in

the most unfavourable circumstances. He also exhibited a lively intelligence and

a ready wit in his conversation. There can be no doubt of his popularity in his

earlier years, and there are two most convincing proofs of the charm that he was

able to exert. His cousin the emperor time and time again refrained from

punishing him as harshly as he would have punished others who committed

similar offences, and his first wife, to whom he was consistently unfaithful,

seems never to have allowed such episodes to prevent her from continuing to

adore him.

Unfortunately these attractions were counterbalanced by less desirable

qualities. His most salient characteristic, both in his private and in his public life,

was to assume that whatever he wanted must be his, or must be done, without

regard for the consequences. In addition, he was not restrained by any of the

religious or moral scruples that one would consider generally acceptable, and

conspiracy, betrayal and perjury seemed to him to be the natural means of

achieving his boundless ambitions. Even when young he aspired to the imperial

throne, and he never relinquished this dream until he succeeded in gaining it. We

might even believe that if he had known that death would be the price of his

ambition, this would not have deterred him.

Little information survives about the first thirty years of Andronicus’s life.

He was of approximately the same age as Manuel, who became emperor at the

age of twenty-three, and was brought up together with him; the memory of

shared escapades of their youth may explain the extraordinary leniency of

Manuel towards his cousin in later days.

The first eight years of Manuel’s reign passed without notable problems.

Andronicus was married, and although we do not know his wife’s name, later

events make it clear that she was devoted to him. She had borne him a son,

whom he called Manuel, and a daughter, Maria. In 1151, however, when he was

about thirty years old, he involved himself in an affair which caused a scandal at

the court. The emperor Manuel had, as has already been mentioned, taken as his

mistress his niece Theodora, and now Andronicus entered into a similar

relationship with Theodora’s sister Eudocia, who had been widowed at an early

age. The lady’s family was scandalised by the situation, but Andronicus reacted

to any complaints which reached his ears with cheerful scorn. It was only fitting,

he said, that a subject should follow the example set by his master; besides, his

relationship was being conducted with one who was only a second cousin, while

the emperor was bedding his own brother’s daughter.

It must have been at least partly for this reason that Manuel decided that

Andronicus must be removed from court. In 1152, therefore, he sent him five

hundred miles away to Cilicia, to wage war against the Armenian prince Thorus.

The expedition was a failure. Andronicus distinguished himself in battle, but

after a while was forced to retreat, and was recalled to Constantinople.

He was then given another command on the Hungarian frontier, but this was

terminated when the emperor discovered that he had been conducting an intrigue

with the king of Hungary with the object of overthrowing his cousin, and was

even rumoured to be planning to assassinate him. Such was Manuel’s indulgence

that the only further penalty that he visited on Andronicus was to strip him of the

governorships of Belgrade and Brainitzova with which he had recently invested

him, and then to bring him to Pelagonia in Macedonia, where the imperial court

was in residence, in the hope that he would stay out of trouble if watched more

closely. This, however, was the reverse of a punishment, since Andronicus now

found himself once more within range of the fair Eudocia, with whom he lost no

time in renewing his former relationship.

An event followed which was characteristic of him. Eudocia’s brother and

brother-in-law, enraged at the way in which their family’s good name was being

brought into disrepute, decided to assassinate the man who was the cause of this.

The court was in temporary accommodation, and one day, when Andronicus was

spending a few hours in his mistress’s tent, her relatives posted a band of armed

men nearby, to kill him when he came out, hoping to catch him in a moment of

weakness. But news of the plot was transmitted to Eudocia and although, as

Nicetas tells us, the information reached her at a moment when she had her mind

on other matters, she was able to warn her lover, and propose a course of action.

She suggested that she should call one of her maid-servants to her from outside

the tent, and that Andronicus should then put on female clothing and make his

escape, pretending to be the same servant going on an errand. The ruse was of a

kind that appealed to her lover’s agile mind, but he rejected it. He might have

felt that it would be impossible to conceal the sudden increase in height of the

supposed maidservant, but he also feared that even if the trick were successful,

he would be subjected to ridicule afterwards, and he was not prepared to face

this. So with a sudden stroke of his sword he cut a great gash in the side of the

tent, leaped through it, and was away before his would-be assassins realised

what was happening.

Another source tells us that at this time Andronicus made two attempts to

bring about the death of the emperor. This may be only a slander spread by his

enemies, but whether it is true or not, Manuel now decided that it was no longer

safe to have his rival free, and had him taken to Constantinople and imprisoned

in the imperial palace. This happened in 1155, when Andronicus was about

thirty-five years old, and he stayed a prisoner for nine years altogether.

Being the man he was, he thought only of escape, and on two occasions he

managed to break free. When he had been in prison for three years, he noticed

that a disused drain passed beneath the tower of the palace in which he was

imprisoned, and he managed to excavate an entry to it. Then one day he slipped

inside, arranging things so that there was no sign that anyone had passed that

way. When dinner time arrived, he was gone, and there was no evidence left to

show how this had happened.

Manuel was at this time campaigning in Cilicia. The authorities in

Constantinople were enormously embarrassed by the disappearance of their

prisoner, and the hunt began at once. The gates of the city were closed, ships

along the sea walls and in the Golden Horn were boarded and searched, and

there was an investigation of all possible places of hiding inside the walls.

Messengers were sent in all directions with warrants for his arrest. In addition,

Andronicus’s wife was immediately placed under detention in the very cell that

had held her husband, so that she might not escape with him; she was, like

everyone else, unconscious of the fact that he was only a few feet beneath her.

Darkness fell, and in the stillness of the night Andronicus resurrected himself.

His wife was at first terrified out of her wits, believing the dusty figure which

appeared before her to be his ghost, but it was not long before she received

convincing proof that her husband did indeed stand before her in the flesh; in

fact, nine months later, Andronicus became the father of a second son, who was

called John or Ioannes. The reunion lasted for a week, with our hero, like a male

Persephone, spending half his time above the earth and the other half in the

realms of Hades. Then, when the vigilance of the guards around the palace had

been relaxed a little, Andronicus was able to slip past them and leave the city. He

headed into Asia, but here his luck deserted him. He was recognised and

captured, and taken back to Constantinople.

It was nearly six years before he managed to get free again. By 1164 the

conditions of imprisonment had been relaxed a little, and he was allowed to have

the services of a young lad who was charged with the duty of bringing him his

food, and a ration of wine for medicinal purposes. Andronicus used the lad to

obtain an impression in wax of the key of his prison cell, which was delivered to

his ever-faithful wife and used to make a copy. At the same time a rope was

smuggled in to him in one of the jars in which his wine was delivered.

Then one night his page unlocked the door of the cell. Andronicus made his

way to the battlements of the palace, tied his rope around a merlon and slid to the

ground. It had been arranged that a vessel should be waiting nearby on the banks

of the Golden Horn, but now he had a narrow escape from disaster. No one had

remembered that there was a regular patrol of guards along the side of the palace

that faced the water, and as luck would have it, they arrived at this time. His

quick wits, however, came at once to his aid. He rushed up to the soldiers who

made up the patrol and begged for their assistance. ‘Help me!’ he cried. ‘I am a

slave, and I have just escaped from prison. Do not let me fall into the hands of

my master; he will punish me very harshly.’ The story was easy to believe,

because he was still wearing the fetters of a prisoner; he took care to mangle his

Greek like a barbarian; and at the same time the captain of the ship which was

waiting to rescue him added verisimilitude to the story by rushing up, claiming

that Andronicus belonged to him, and demanding that his property should be

returned. The soldiers found the situation amusing and immediately released the

supposed runaway to the mercies of his master, laughing at the thought of the

penalties that he would suffer.

So Andronicus escaped from Constantinople, and before long he had reached

Anchialus on the western coast of the Black Sea. The governor of that city was

someone to whom he had done a good turn in the past, so he was able to obtain

money and guides, his intention being to go further and take refuge with a

Russian prince named Jaroslav. But alas, when he was only a little distant from

the border he was recognised by some shepherds as the man for whose arrest

warrants had been issued, detained by them and handed over once again to the

emperor’s men.

Another man might have given up hope at this point, but not Andronicus.

Although well guarded he devised a means of escape by pretending to be

afflicted by the malady that so often strikes travellers in strange lands, and

feigned the necessity to dismount from his horse from time to time and remove

himself a short distance from the road. By nightfall his guards had become

accustomed to this routine, observing it with careless amusement, and then he

seized the opportunity for which he had been waiting. Dismounting as usual he

retired a little distance, and in the dusk arranged his cloak and hat upon a stick

planted in the ground, so that they resembled a squatting figure; then creeping on

his belly like a snake, he vanished into the gloom. By the time the ruse was

discovered, he had gone, and after a few days was able to make his way across

the border, where he was hospitably received by Prince Jaroslav, who was glad

to make use of him as an adviser in affairs of state, and made a personal

companion of him, lodging him in his own dwelling and inviting him to dine at

his own table.

When news of this situation reached Manuel, he was on the point of

marching westwards to open a campaign in Hungary, and the thought of leaving

Andronicus on the Russian border, nearer to Constantinople than he himself

was, must have been unattractive. He therefore thought it wiser to pardon his

cousin, and promised that if he returned, his liberty and safety would be

guaranteed. An added factor may have been that the Eudocia affair was nine

years in the past, and besides, the lady had now been married again, to a

successful military man by the name of Michael Gavras, so there was less chance

of scandal in that quarter.

Andronicus accepted the offer, returned, and as if to show that for the time

being he intended to be loyal, played a distinguished part in the siege of

Zeugminon north of Belgrade on the Hungarian border. Soon after, however, his

individuality reasserted itself. Manuel, who at that time had a daughter but as yet

no son, decided to arrange a dynastic marriage, which might give him a male

heir, between his daughter and Prince Bela of Hungary, whose name was

changed to Alexius to make him a proper member of the imperial family. The

engagement was announced, but Andronicus refused to swear an oath of

allegiance to the new heirs. It would, he said, be shameful for the Romans to be

governed by someone of foreign blood, and besides, Manuel himself was not yet

too old to hope for a male heir. The back-handed compliment may or may not

have pleased the emperor, but in fact it turned out to be prophetic: within a few

years he did find himself the father of a son, the future Alexius II.

But before this happened Manuel had decided that it would be better if

Andronicus were away from the court. So once again our hero was sent to

Cilicia to wage war against his old opponent the Armenian ruler Thorus. Not

surprisingly, the result was the same as before: although on some occasions he

distinguished himself in battle, his negligence in the administration of his

command led to his being unsuccessful.

In addition, he now found an enterprise more to his liking. The whole of the

Levant was buzzing with stories of the charms of Philippa of Antioch, a princess

who in addition to being endowed with a remarkable beauty was also a younger

sister of Manuel’s empress. This was too much for Andronicus to resist. He gave

up the Cilician campaign and hastened to Syria, where he laid siege to the lady

according to the best conventions. He paraded beneath her window wearing his

finest clothing, boots and tunic made according to the latest fashion and crafted

to show off his manly form, and taking with him an escort of pretty blond boys

bearing silver bows. His reputation and his presence made up for the ravages

which half a century had worked upon his features, and so, although more than

twenty years separated them, Philippa yielded and promised to be his bride (he

was by that time a widower).

When the news reached Constantinople Manuel’s rage was all that might

have been expected. At once he sent a new governor to Cilicia, one Constantine

Kalamanos, who was charged with the twin assignments of replacing

Andronicus in his command and, if possible, supplanting him in the affections

of Philippa. But the young lady would have none of him. At first she would not

even admit him into her presence, and when she did, it was only to make jests at

his expense, comparing his short stature unfavourably with Andronicus’s

majestic height, and his lack of nobility with the splendid lineage of her beloved.

So Manuel’s emissary, although younger, was forced to admit defeat, while the

princess became increasingly smitten with her mature lover.

Disappointment, however, lay in store for her, because after a few more

weeks of dalliance Andronicus grew weary of her; or perhaps he made a prudent

analysis of his situation, financial and otherwise, now that imperial support had

been withdrawn. At any rate, whatever his primary reason may have been, he left

for Jerusalem, taking with him what remained of the funds that had been given

to him for the conduct of his official assignment. Philippa was left desolate, and

her end was a sad one. She remained single for nearly ten years, and was then

married to the Constable of Jerusalem, Humphrey de Toron, an elderly invalid,

after which she promptly went into a decline and died.

Meanwhile Andronicus, his vigour reinforced by this episode, had reached

Jerusalem and was hospitably received by its Frankish rulers. Further joys

awaited him there, since he found resident in the city a Byzantine princess,

Theodora, another niece of the emperor Manuel. This Theodora had been

married at the age of thirteen to Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem, had been

widowed at seventeen and had now reached the full ripeness of twenty-two

years. She was within the prohibited degrees of kinship, but this, as in the case

of Eudocia, did not discourage Andronicus, who was immediately inflamed with

passion for her. His passion was returned, and there now began a most

remarkable romanc. It started at Acre, where Theodora was the hostess. Then

Andronicus received her at Beyrouth, which Amaury the new king of Jerusalem

gave him as a fief.

The news of the latest family affair reached Manuel in Constantinople. On

this occasion he ceased to be charitable towards his cousin, and gave orders that

Andronicus was to be arrested and blinded (a form of punishment which was

popular in the Byzantine world, since it rendered political opponents impotent,

while avoiding problems of a religious nature such as might be created by killing

those who had committed no actual crime; if done skilfully, it could even be

managed without shedding blood, by the skilful placing of white hot irons close

to the eyeballs). Luckily for Andronicus, a copy of the imperial dispatch found

its way in Theodora’s hands, and the two lovers decided to seek safety in other

lands rather than part.

Now began a period in our hero’s life when he showed what was for him a

remarkable constancy, since Theodora lasted him for about twelve years. With

nothing but his wits and his reputation to aid him he wandered from place to

place on the fringes of the Moslem world, seeming to find a welcome wherever

he went, although none of the rulers who showed him hospitality was willing to

grant him more than temporary residence for fear of inviting reprisals from the

emperor in Constantinople. So he moved from Damascus to Harran to Baghdad,

to Mardin and Ezerum, to the Georgian kingdom of Iberia and to the Chaldaean

Turks, and in this last area, on the southern shores of the Black Sea, he was

given permission to settle by the Turkish ruler, and granted the occupation of a

fortress near the boundary which marked the beginning of Byzantine territory.

He repaid the hospitality of his patron by indulging in the occasional raid across

the border and taking Roman prisoners whom he sold into slavery, and in this

fashion he survived for several years, managing to avoid the attempts to

recapture him which were made from time to time by the agents of the infuriated

Manuel.

Theodora was his companion during this period, and not only Theodora, but

his son John or Ioannes who had been conceived in prison in 1158 and was now

reaching manhood; and as time went by a little Alexius and a little Irene arrived

to swell their company. But after several more years had passed, this amatory

idyll was interrupted, because Theodora and their children were taken prisoner

by the Byzantine duke of Trebizond, Nicephorus Palaeologus. This was too

much for Andronicus. Life without his Theodora was unbearable, and he

decided to give Manuel best, in the hope of rejoining his mistress and their

children.

There was an exchange of messages: the emperor promised his errant cousin

safe conduct and the errant cousin promised to mend his ways. Andronicus

returned to Constantinople, where he entered the imperial presence with a typical

theatrical gesture. He had wound an iron chain around his body beneath his

clothing, and without revealing this he threw himself to the floor in the

emperor’s audience chamber. Then when Manuel, weeping with emotion, bade

him rise, he began to unwind the chain, commanding those around him to drag

him like a captive to the very foot of the throne. The man who took up the offer

was a certain Isaac Angelus, of whom we shall hear more. The dramatic scene

did Andronicus no harm. He was given a prodigal’s welcome, and although

Manuel was wise enough not to allow him to reside again in the capital, a

comfortable exile was arranged for him as the governor of Oenaeum, a city on

the southern coast of the Black Sea. We must presume that Theodora was

allowed to accompany him there, although no chronicler actually tells us so.

For the next few years we hear little of Andronicus. But even when he had

passed his sixtieth year, his ambitions were not laid to rest, and the death of

Manuel in 1180 reawakened them.

The new emperor, Manuel’s son Alexius, was only eleven years old. He was

inexperienced in government, and had until this time shown no aptitude for

anything but childish sports.

His mother, Xéne, formerly Maria of Antioch, sister of the unfortunate

Philippa, governed as regent. She was the first person of Latin blood to rule at

Constantinople, and it needed no more than this to make her unpopular with the

Greek portion of the population of that city. Her late husband had encouraged

westerners, and during his reign an increasing part of the rich trade of the empire

had fallen into the hands of Frankish and Italian merchants. Maria-Xene’s

policies were a continuation rather than an extension of her late husband’s, but

because she was not Greek, and perhaps because she was a woman, the

dissatisfaction that they caused was doubled.

She had also made the mistake of taking as her most favoured adviser an

elegant noble, another Alexius Comnenus, a Roman, but one with extreme pro-

western sympathies. Naturally enough, rumour at once made them lovers: as

Eustathius put it, encapsulating what in Thessalonica could have been no more

than gossip from afar, ‘many aimed the arrows of their desire at her, but the

shaft of Alexius outstripped all the rest’. Manuel had dignified Alexius with the

rank of Protosebastus or ‘First Augustus’, this being about half way up the

increasingly inflated system of titulature which the Comnenian emperors had

developed as a means of putting their relatives and favourites upon the imperial

payroll. The titles, like those that have been devised in the last generation for

senior university managers, ranged from the simple Sebastus to the highest one,

Panhyperprotosebastus, literally ‘Overall First Augustus’. Our contemporary

sources usually refer to him simply as the Protosebastus. It is not surprising that

although when Manuel was alive Maria-Xene seems to have been accepted by

the people of Constantinople, she was now hated, and her new name of Xéne,

‘the Foreigner’ was used as a way of attacking her, which it had not been in the

first place. We may make a comparison with the later Marie-Antoinette of

France, who came increasingly to be known in her later years as ‘the Austrian

woman’.

In less than two years the general discontent led to an incident of some

seriousness. Manuel’s daughter by his first marriage, another Mary or Maria, had

been married to a western princeling, Renier of Montferrat, after the proposed

marriage with Bela of Hungary failed to go ahead. The two of them were

naturally not inclined to support Manuel’s second wife, and hatched a plot,

which was discovered even while it was being planned. The conspirators and

some of their supporters then raced to the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia

Sophia, and barricaded themselves within it. Whether they were treating the

building as a sanctuary or as a fortress is not clear, but the result was the same:

the government was in a difficult situation. The Greek population of

Constantinople was solidly in favour of the conspirators, and in addition the

patriarch Theodosius, and the clergy as a whole, were on their side. Soldiers

were sent to rout the conspirators out of the Great Church. There was fighting in

the holy place - a great scandal in a city so devoted to the forms of religion - and

the Patriarch had to intervene. An amnesty was granted to the conspirators (a

sign of weakness), and then, in an attempt to demonstrate that they were in

control of events, the emperor’s mother, acting as regent, together with the

Protosebastus, exiled the patriarch to a monastery. This was a mistake. The city

was immediately crowded with hostile demonstrations and it was not long before

Theodosius was brought back and led in triumph through the streets of

Constantinople, with the cheers of the crowd and the joyful smoke of incense

symbolising the defeat of the temporal by the everlasting powers.

These goings-on became known to Andronicus. The time had come, as it so

often does, when the government was in disrepute and the people were looking

for a saviour, any saviour. Prophecies were beginning to be heard that he would

be the next emperor, and these were treated seriously by many in Constantinople,

who would have seen him as representing the established dynasty and

established traditions rather than domination by a foreigner. The news from the

capital was so satisfactory that Andronicus gathered together such troops as he

could muster and set out along the coast of the Black Sea for Constantinople.

When he reached it he encamped on the other side of the Bosporus, announcing

that he had come to the aid of the emperor Alexius.

Inflated reports of the size and condition of his forces had reached the city,

and the soldiers who were sent to stop him refused to fight. It was not long

before a great stream of Greeks of all classes was crossing the Bosporus to pay

him homage, their enthusiasm so kindled by his presence that they failed to

notice how small his army was, how few his ships and how poorly he was

prepared for serious warfare. As Eustathius sarcastically reports, ‘His former

popularity persuaded them to desire him now, believing that by simply appearing

he would ensure that all would be well for them. Their mouths vomited forth

praises of every kind, they repeatedly cried, ‘Glory to God!’ and they summoned

him to join them in Constantinople at once, as if it were possible for him to leap

across the narrows in an instant; no doubt the natural swift-footedness of the

man was responsible for suggesting this idea to them.’

So Andronicus entered the city through the Golden Gate in the manner of a

victor. The demands that he made on behalf of the young emperor whom he had

come to protect were at first modest. He insisted only that Maria-Xene should

retire to a monastery, that the Protosebastus should be removed, and that all the

powers of government should be placed in the hands of Alexius. If he had been

faced with a determined and well-organised opposition, supported by the Latins

resident in Constantinople, his position would not have been easy to sustain, but

the Protosebastus decided not to make a fight for it, and he was soon arrested,

blinded as a precaution against further activity on his part, and left to his own

devices thereafter. This quiet and merciful beginning to Andronicus’s period of

power did not, however, set the tone for what followed, because it was

succeeded by a massacre of the Latin inhabitants of the city, principally Genoese

and Venetians. Hardly any escaped; even women, children and the old were

butchered by the Greeks, who were venting a hatred which had been

accumulating for a long time.

The massacre of the Latins in 1182, which was, if not actively encouraged by

Andronicus, at least not resisted, was one of the things that led to his downfall.

But for the moment his star was in the ascendant. He could present himself in

Constantinople as the protector of the young emperor and as the liberator of the

Greeks from foreign oppression. He was the object of almost universal

enthusiasm and flattery, ‘lightening their darkness with a starry radiance’ and so

on. In only one quarter was there any potentially dangerous opposition, and this

took the form of suspicion rather than an outright challenge. Theodosius the

patriarch of Constantinople was the official guardian of the young emperor, and

was not disposed to put much faith in the protestations of loyalty and affection

that Andronicus was now heaping on Alexius. Andronicus was conscious of this

lack of support, and Theodosius was soon persuaded to retire to a monastery. He

was replaced by a creature of Andronicus’s, one Basil Camaterus.

Only three lives now stood in the way of his ambition, those of Manuel’s

widow and of Manuel’s children by his two marriages. Manuel’s daughter Mary

or Maria was the first to go, in spite of the fact that her opposition to the

previous régime had had a great deal to do with the series of events which had

led to Andronicus’s return to the capital. She and her husband Renier of

Montferrat died suddenly. It was rumoured that poison had been the cause.

It took longer to remove the emperor’s mother. A campaign began to be

mounted against her, with allegations that she was plotting against the state, that

she should not be allowed any part in the administration of the empire, and that

if this dangerous woman were not removed, Andronicus himself would find it

impossible to continue assisting the young emperor. The people of

Constantinople were only too ready to join in an attack on ‘the foreign woman’,

and after a series of demonstrations she was removed from the palace. A piece of

judicial play-acting followed: she was accused before a tribunal of entering into

pacts with foreign rulers, and found guilty. Shortly afterwards her son was

forced to sign a sentence of death, placing his name on the document, as Nicetas

tells us, ‘in ink as red as blood’. Maria-Xene, formerly of Antioch, Empress of

the Romans, was then strangled in her cell with a silken cord. She had lived for

thirty-five years and was still very beautiful.

His next manoeuvre was to seek increased support for himself by threatening

to return to his governorship of Oenaeum, contrasting the insupportable burden

of his responsibilities in Constantinople with the wealth and other advantages

that awaited him if he resumed his former position. He inspired men to stir up

feeling in Constantinople on his behalf; they were to persuade the people that the

city would be in danger if Andronicus were not formally associated upon the

throne with the young and inexperienced little emperor, the weakness of the one

being balanced by the vigour of the other. Building on this, they then began to

declare that Andronicus should be invited to become co-emperor, even forced to

agree to this if it should happen not to be his wish, and in the end a great

performance was arranged along these lines. Eustathius gives us a graphic

account: a deputation appeared before Andronicus, threw themselves at his feet

and begged him to accept the imperial power and to share in taking the reins of it

in hand, lest, as they put it, the emperor Alexius, this young Phaethon taking

charge of the chariot of the empire without the necessary skill, should bring

disaster upon everything. And when they rose and released his feet, they

stretched out their hands to him as if he were divine; he, on the other hand, gave

an appearance of being distressed, and seemed to find even the thought of living

unbearable, if he had to hear such suggestions and be, as it were, coached in

infidelity. ‘How could I do this?’ he cried, and threatened them, saying, ‘I shall

exile myself, I shall take my life, if I am not left in peace.’

In the end he allowed himself to be persuaded and, still feigning reluctance,

was dragged to a small church in the vicinity of the imperial palace and

acclaimed as emperor. The imperial slippers were placed upon his feet, although

he kept on shuffling them from side to side as he continued to pretend

unwillingness, and he was adorned with the imperial diadem and robes. A more

formal ceremony of coronation followed shortly afterwards in the Great Church,

the Church of the Holy Wisdom.

But once he had attained imperial rank, his true nature began to show itself.

He soon took precedence over Alexius on state occasions, and began to fill such

offices as fell vacant with candidates of his own choosing. And within a month

he had achieved his final aim: the young emperor was deposed, and a few days

later strangled with a silken cord. The corpse was then beheaded, the head

hidden in a secret place, and the body, now unidentifiable, placed in a lead

coffin and thrown in the Bosporus to join the other such offerings that this

stretch of water holds.

At the age of sixty-three, Andronicus had now become Emperor of the

Romans. His next action, tying up loose ends, was to marry the widow of

Alexius. ‘Widow’ is an inexact expression. Agnes was the daughter of King

Louis VII of France. A dynastic marriage had been arranged at the end of

Manuel’s reign, and the little French princess, then only eight years old, had been

brought to Constantinople, re-named Anna, installed in the palace and betrothed

to the young prince. But even after he became emperor a full marriage may have

been delayed in view of the extreme youth of the lad and of his destined bride.

No such scruples held Andronicus back. A marriage took place before the year

was out. We have no evidence that it was ever consummated, and certainly the

new emperor did not lack for more mature companions, but of course the

chroniclers of the time enjoyed assuming that it had been, and the thought

spurred on their slavering pens.

‘And he, with the stink of age upon him,’ wrote Nicetas, ‘was not ashamed

to lie unlawfully with his nephew’s pink-cheeked tender bride who had not yet

completed her eleventh year, the withered suitor embracing the unripe maiden,

the old man in his dotage clasping the damsel with pointed breasts, the shrivelled

and languid greybeard clinging to the rosy-fingered girl dripping with the early

morning dew of love.’

Eustathius, as befitted a churchman, was less specific, but also gave his

imagination free rein, writing, ‘and after having experienced a different kind of

gentle loving, the little princess loathed the roughness of Andronicus.

Sometimes, they say, she would imagine in her dreams that she saw the young

Alexius, and would cry out his name, and she alone knew what she suffered.’

Spicy stuff indeed, but there is no reason to assume that Agnes-Anna had a

hard time of it. It was, after all, a marriage which had been entered into for

reasons of state. Andronicus did in fact offer her to his son Manuel first, and

only when this offer was declined did he marry her himself. We need not

suppose that by so doing he had any thought in his head except that of making

sure that she would not, if left alone or married to anyone else, become a focus

for rebellion. Later, when all the trouble was over and she had become his

widow, she remained at the court, and subsequently became the partner of a

Byzantine nobleman, Theodore Vranas.

Andronicus was now the unchallenged ruler of the Byzantine world, and

during the two years of his reign his achievements were considerable. He set

himself the task of eliminating corruption from government, and was in part

successful. The first step was to appoint provincial governors without making

them pay large sums for these appointments. It was therefore no longer essential

for them to overtax the provincials in order to recoup their outlay. The tax

collectors themselves were also rigorously supervised and the economic

condition of the whole empire began to improve. Constantinople itself also

benefited. The water supply of the capital was increased, and the Church of the

Forty Martyrs was redecorated. Andronicus also had his first wife disinterred

and buried in a more splendid tomb as a mark of his great respect for her. We

must regret the disappearance of another of his creations, a new church at

Constantinople which was decorated with a series of paintings illustrating at

least some episodes of his earlier life.

But in addition to his administrative and financial reforms, he began a

campaign to break the power of the military aristocracy which had for so long

gone unchallenged. This led to revolts against him and refusals to accept his

authority.

At the beginning of his reign he conducted several notable sieges of cities in

which his opponents had installed themselves. The first was at Nicaea in

Bithynia, which was defended by Isaac Angelus, the man who had been a

participant in the last reconciliation scene played between Manuel and

Andronicus. During the siege Andronicus employed an Israelite stratagem, when

he had Eudoxia (to be distinguished from Eudocia), the mother of Isaac Angelus,

brought from Constantinople and mounted upon a battering ram, a manoeuvre

which tested the aim of the defenders severely, although the lady was not

harmed. When the city surrendered, Isaac Angelus was spared, a decision which

cost Andronicus his life.

The city of Prusa was also captured, and since it had not surrendered it was

more harshly treated. Nicetas wrote that ‘he left the vines of Prusa weighed

down with bodies like clusters of grapes, and forbade those who had been

punished by being impaled on stakes to be taken down for burial; so, baked in

the sun, they swayed in the breezes like scarecrows in a garden of cucumbers.’

It is a fact of life that remission of taxes does not bring lasting gratitude. So

before long it was the harsh and repressive nature of Andronicus’s government

that was most felt, while his reforms were taken for granted. Men forgot these

reforms, or forgot who had been responsible for them; they found it easier to

remember how he treated a man who had spoken disrespectfully of him, having

him publicly barbecued in the Hippodrome, the public racecourse of the city.

His popularity faded, the air was thick with plotting, and his only recourse

was to institute a Tiberian régime of terror and torture. Many were executed, but

some escaped to the West, and it was this that led to his downfall.

Another Alexius Comnenus, not the same person as the murdered boy-

emperor, or the Protosebastus, but a nephew of the late emperor Manuel, found

his way to Palermo to the palace of the Norman king, William II.

William was willing to seize any opportunity which offered itself, and this

Alexius Comnenus now presented a most convenient excuse for taking action,

since he was near enough to the Byzantine throne to be presented as a possible

rival emperor - or could at any rate be allowed to think of himself in this way. By

coincidence another potential claimant was also brought to William’s court. This

was a lad who had appeared on the east coast of the Adriatic, and had then been

brought to Sicily and presented in public as the emperor Alexius who, it was

claimed, had not really been killed but was still alive. When Andronicus heard

the news he is said to have sneered and said that the boy must have been a fine

swimmer, if he could travel underwater all the way from Constantinople to

Sicily, and it is equally unlikely that William was deceived, but in the

circumstances any pretext for an assault on the Byzantine empire was useful.

So in June 1185 a great expedition left Messina and sailed around the foot of

Italy and across the Adriatic to Dyrrachium, which was quickly captured. From

there the army marched across into Greece by land, aiming for the capital of

Macedonia, Thessalonica.

The fleet then sailed around the south of Greece to meet it. It arrived nine

days after the army had encamped around the city, and then the siege began in

earnest.

Thessalonica resisted the attack with vigour. The siege might even have

failed, or at any rate lasted longer, had it not been for the failure of the Byzantine

aristocracy to play their part. Andronicus sent several small armies to relieve it,

but the commanders of these forces kept at a distance when a joint assault by

them and by the defenders might have driven the invaders back.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that the siege was not protracted. It

began in earnest on the 15th of August 1185, and on the 24th the enemy broke

into the city through a gap in the weakest wall, the eastern one, after

undermining it from below and attacking it with stones hurled from a huge

catapult. Once the wall had collapsed the attackers, eager to loot and rape,

swarmed into Thessalonica and the defenders were unable to offer any further

resistance.

The fall of Thessalonica did not lead to further victories for William. He had

over-extended himself, and six months later his army was defeated in Thrace.

The survivors fled back to Sicily by sea.

Constantinople was not attacked, but the invasion and the panic that it caused

led to the collapse of Andronicus’s régime, because it revealed the weakness of

his position. Although he took action to improve the defences of the city, he

seems in other respects to have retreated into a paranoid state in which he

suspected plotting everywhere, and ordered numerous executions. Nicetas

reports that by now ‘a day on which he ordered no man’s death was for him a

day wasted’, and in addition paints the picture of a man increasingly given over

to sexual excesses: ‘Andronicus would have liked to emulate the thirteenth

Labour of Hercules, who lay with all the fifty daughters of Thespius in a single

night, but he needed to resort to artifice to restore his nerves, anointing himself

with a certain balm to increase his vigour, and including in his diet the flesh of

the Egyptian skink.’ We cannot tell whether there may have been any truth in

such rumours, but there can be no doubt that by now he was suffering from

persecution mania. A month after the fall of Thessalonica he issued a decree that

those who had been imprisoned or exiled on political charges, together with their

families, were to be executed on the grounds of having conspired with the

Norman invaders, who at that time were still in Greece.

The instruction was never carried out. Among the orders that Andronicus

issued was one for the arrest of Isaac Angelus, who had been living quietly for

two years since his surrender at the siege of Nicaea. He was an obvious focus for

the aristocratic opposition and had been identified by a soothsayer as the

successor to the throne. Isaac was uncooperative. He ran the emperor’s

messenger through with his sword, mounted his horse and galloped to the Great

Church of the Holy Wisdom where he took sanctuary.

The news spread, crowds gathered and he found many supporters, not only

among the common people but also among those other members of the

aristocracy who realised that their lives too were in danger. The next day there

was a riot in the city.

The prisons were opened and the political prisoners released, and by popular

assent Isaac was proclaimed Emperor of the Romans.

Andronicus was at that moment away from Constantinople. He hastened

back, but when he arrived it was too late for him to attempt to regain control.

Realising that all was lost, he slipped off his imperial robes and attempted to

flee, accompanied by his child-bride Agnes-Anna and, practical to the last, his

favourite concubine Maraptiké. Embarking on a small ship he sailed out of the

Golden Horn towards the Bosporus, hoping to reach safety on the northern

shores of the Black Sea, but he was soon captured and brought back to

Constantinople and delivered to the mercies of Isaac Angelus. Nicetas tells us

what happened to him then.

He was thrown into prison and fettered with the kind of iron collar used for

wild beasts in the amphitheatre, then paraded before the new emperor, whose

courtiers slapped and kicked him, tore out his beard, knocked out his teeth and

shaved his head. Then his right hand, with which he had signed so many

warrants for execution, was cut off with an axe and he was sent back again into

his cell.

Some days later he was taken out again and delivered to the mob. One eye

was gouged out immediately; they left him the other, so that he could better

observe what was happening to him. He was mounted upon a mangy camel and,

in a parody of a triumphal procession, paraded through the Forum of

Constantinople, looking like the leafless and withered stump of an aged tree. His

head, from which the hair had been shaven and the beard plucked out, shone

before everyone balder than an egg, and his body was covered only with a few

rags. Persons of the lower sort came rushing from the taverns to have their sport

with him. Once they had hailed him as their saviour, and sworn loyalty to him.

Now some struck him on the head with clubs, others crammed dung into his

nostrils, or used sponges to pour urine into his eyes. They reviled his mother and

all his forebears, they jabbed his ribs with roasting spits, they pelted him with

stones and a prostitute emptied a jug of boiling water over his face. In this way,

still slumped across his camel, he reached the Hippodrome, where he was

suspended upside down from a stone lintel which stretched across two columns

there. Still alive he moaned, ‘Lord’, have mercy!’ and ‘Why do you further

bruise the broken reed?’ - but he was shown no compassion. The excited mob

tore his remaining clothes from him and assaulted his private parts. One man

drove a sword upwards through his open mouth and throat into his body, while

others stood behind him, vying with one another to see who could make the

deepest slashes in his buttocks.

At last his sufferings came to an end. He died, and as he did so his mutilated

right arm jerked round towards his mouth, while men jeered at him, for being a

bloodsucker to the last. His life ended in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the

scene of some of the greatest Byzantine public spectacles and imperial

ceremonial, in which he himself had yearned for power and exercised it; as it has

been said, ‘Ambition’s cradle often is its grave’.

After several days his body was taken down, but Isaac refused to allow it to

be placed in the Church of the Forty Martyrs, which Andronicus had restored

with the intention that it should be his tomb, or even given burial of any kind. It

was taken from the Hippodrome to an outlying district of the city and exposed to

view in a place where, years later, it could still be seen, not completely

decomposed, by those who passed by.

You may find this story horrifying and perhaps disgusting, but let us not look

back on the twelfth century with any sense of superiority. It is not so many years

since, in the forecourt of a petrol station in Milan in April 1945, another man of

great ability who had the ambition to be a Roman emperor hung head

downwards while those who had once followed him stared at his body. The

parallels between the lives and deaths of Andronicus Comnenus and Benito

Mussolini are not exact, but their iifates illustrate the same maxim, the truth of

which has often been illustrated.

He who would aspire to be Emperor of the Romans, to exercise power and

enjoy the trappings of majesty, must be prepared to pay the penalty if fortune

does not smile on him. In the words of the proverb, ‘Take what you want, God

says, and pay for it.’

i This lecture is printed here in the form in which it was delivered at a plenary session during the XVIth Biennial Conference of the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales in April 2010. It owes much, perhaps too much, to the elegant essay ‘Les aventures d’Andronic Comnène’, published by Charles Diehl as Chapter IV (pp. 86-133) of the second volume of his Figures Byzantines (see below). The principal contemporary sources are as follows. For the emperor's earlier life, John Cinnamus (Epitome, ed. A. Meineke, Bonn 1836; English translation by C. Brand, deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus) is the best source. For the events of his reign the later historian Nicetas Choniates has the most information (Historia, ed. J. L. van Dieten, Berlin/New York 1975; English translation by H. Magoulias, O City of Byzantium, Detroit 1984). Nicetas resigned his position after Andronicus became emperor, so it is not surprising that he paints a generally negative picture of the man who seized power in such an evil fashion, and perhaps enjoyed describing his death in such graphic detail, but he found himself able to give him credit for some good actions where credit was due. For the events leading up to Andronicus's succession to the imperial throne, the account by Eustathios of the siege of Thessalonica by the Normans in 1185 is particularly valuable (Eustazio di Tessalonica, la Espugnazione di Tessalonica, testo critico introduzione annotazioni di Stilpon Kyriakides, proemio di Bruno Lavagnini, versione italiana di Vincenzo Rotolo, Palermo 1961, English translation by John R. Melville Jones (Byzantyina Australiensia 8), Canberra 1988). The second volume (Regesten von 1025 bis 1204) of F. Dölger's Corpus der griechischen Urkunden des Mittelalters und der Neueren Zeit, Munich/Berlin 1925, lists twelve references to administrative acts carried out by Andronicus as emperor, but the evidence for these is all contained in Byzantine literary texts or passing references in Venetian records, and no original documents have survived. The letters of Michael Choniates (Michaelis Choniatae epistulae, recensuit Foteini Kolovou, Berlin 2001) mention Andronicus on a number of occasions, always in a negative way, but without giving any information about actual events or of actions carried out by the emperor, so their only relevance in this context is to establish that they were written after Andronicus had died. The most useful modern sources are as follows, in alphabetical order of author's surname: M. Angold, Church and State in Byzantium under the Comneni, Cambridge 1996, L. Bréhier, 'Andronic Comnène' in Dictionnaire d'histoire et de geographie ecclésiastique, Paris 1914, Vol. II cols. 1776-1782; F. Chalandon, Les Comnène, Vol. II, Paris 1912 (reprinted New York 1960) and the chapter 'The later Comneni' in the fourth volume of The Cambridge Mediaeval History (Cambridge 1923), pp. 379-384; F. Cognasso, 'Partiti politici e lote dinastiche a Bisanzio alla morte di Manuele Comneno' in Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Serie seconda t. LXII, Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 1912,

pp. 213-317, J. Danstrup, 'Recherches critiques sur Andronicus Ier' in Vetenskaps-Societeten i Lund, Årsbok 1944, Lund 1945, pp. 71-101; C. Diehl, Figures byzantines (2 vols), Paris 1905 and 1908; A. Eastmond, 'An Intentional Error? Imperial art and "Mis"-Interpretation under Andronikos I Komnenos' in The Art Bulletin vol 76/3, September 1994, pp. 502-510; W. Hecht, Die byzantinische Aussenpolitik zur Zeit der letzten Komnenkaiser (1180-1185), Inaugural-Dissertation Würzburg, Neustadt/Aisch 1967; O. Jurewicz, Andronik I Komnenos, Zaklad Nauk o Kulturze antycznej Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Wrozlaw 1962, republished Amsterdam 1970; A. P. Kazhdan, Social'nyj sostav gospodvujuščego klassa Vizantii XI-XII vv, Moscow 1974, P. Lamma, Comneni e Staufer. Ricerche sui rapporti fra Bizanzio e l'Occidente nel secolo XII (2 vols), Rome 1955 and 1957, E. H. McNeal, 'The story of Isaac and Andronicus' in Speculum IX, 1934, pp. 324-29; M. J. Sjuzjumov, 'Vnutrennaja politika Andronika Komnina i razgrom prigorodov Konstantinopolja v 1187 godu' in Vizantiskij Vremennik 1957, pp. 58-74; S. Szysman, 'Les troupes hongroises au service d'Andronic Comene' in Akten des XI. Internationalen Byzantinistenkongresses in München 1958, Munich 1960, pp. 599-603; P. Trivčev, 'Le regne de l'empereur de Byzance, Andronic Ier Comnène(1183-1185)' in Byzantinoslavica 23, 1962, pp. 19-40; F. Uspensky, 'Imperatory Aleksei II i Andronik Komneny' in Zurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Provesčenija 212, 1880, pp. 95-130 and 214, 1881, pp. 52-85.